Combat Porn

(Writing advice is something I’m afraid this blog is always going to have a fair amount of. When I don’t know what to write about, I tend to want to write about writing. On the one hand, I’m almost embarrassed by the fact that my default mode is to tell other people their business. One the other hand, I could be telling you all about my hair. So take it with a grain of salt, and don’t be shy about offering up your own advice in the comments!)

It’s a truism often repeated that the hardest scenes in fiction to write are sex scenes. Right up there with humor on the “do not attempt lightly” list. While most of your readership knows how the act works and a lot of them are good and interested in it, nailing things down with description…tends to make things decidedly unsexy. There are books-a-plenty which warn amateur authors off adding in love scenes because of the overwhelming probability they will be embarrassing, silly, and generally off-putting.

Oddly, you don’t see as much warning about the sex scene’s near-cousin: the fight scene.

Passion? Intense momentum? Very specific actions which make a very big difference? Check. Tendency toward cliché? Dragging pace? Improbable reactions? Also check. Think about it—aside from the fact that in very few fight scenes, both sides close the section happy, they have a lot more in common than you might think.

I have edited a lot of fight scenes. And I’ve written a fair number, too. So trust me when I say, it is very easy to write a bad fight scene. In fact, it is veryeasy to not even realize you’re writing a bad fight scene—so many of them are bad.

I think the problem starts—in the same fashion the problem with sex scenes starts—with people forgetting they are telling a story about characters, not a play-by-play. These fight scenes focus entirely on the hitting/shooting/blasting. What Character A attacks with, how that connects with Character B. This is, essentially, “combat porn.” If you are only writing loving descriptions of specific physical attacks, you are writing “good” combat porn (as in, people who follow mixed martial arts are going to enjoy it). If you are only following the formula, “[who] hit [whom] [where] [how]” you are writing bad combat porn. If you are making people do flips and twirls, and describing damage that goes away a moment later, you are probably writing atrocious combat porn, and I’m sorry to say, you are in very good company.

“But,” you may be saying, “isn’t that the whole point of a fight scene? To punch some guys?”

As I said, sex scenes and fight scenes aren’t all that different. You are going to have to figure out how to write the mechanics to write a good one. Bad fight scenes can certainly be sunk by writers who don’t pay attention to physics or physiology, geometry or geography. But I have to say, this is—much like a sex scene—not the part that burns most writers.

Because it’s not the whole point of a fight scene. Not by a long shot. After all, fight scenes don’t get special treatment. They don’t get to stop the story any more than any other sort of scene. If your fight scene doesn’t engage your reader, they’ll skim it. If they skim, it’s a little more likely they’ll drop the book altogether.

Applying the same techniques and guidelines to fight scenes as you do the rest of your story isn’t always simple—another reason why it’s easy to write them badly. So here are my six, quick-and-dirty fight scene tips:

Don’t forget the beat. (That’s “beat” not “beat-down.”) A fight scene should always change some aspect of the story. If things are the same before and after, then it’s almost always flab and you should cut it. This is especially true of fight scenes—the way fight scenes affect the tension in your story is unique. If it’s come to a fight then something’s going to resolve one way or another—and yet the result should create a new tension. So what’s resolved? And more importantly, what arises?

Get personal. This fight is happening to a person—your point of view character. What’s going on in their head? Are they scared out of their mind of dying? Are they bored because they’ve been doing this all week and they’re ready for the big game? Are they worried that their friends are judging their ass-kicking techniques? Are they taking out their frustration at their judgy friends on this army of undead? Making the character’s emotional state a focal point of your fight scene might seem touchy-feely, but it’s going to mean your character has a reason to be in this fight. Leave it out, and it starts feeling like a game—fun, but ultimately not very fleshed out.

Get specific, get visceral. Especially if you’re trying to describe a large group of people, make sure you’re focusing on what your main character is experiencing first and foremost. He or she might glance around, but ultimately, they’re trying to stay alive, not update the reader on all the various injuries of their comrades as they occur. Avoid the RPG damage deal—“Elsine got hit. Arthur was knocked off his feet. Enki dodged.” Instead, focus on details that would jump out to a character in a moment of crisis—the smell of burning skin after their spell hits, the sound of a screaming horse, the color of monster blood turns when it hits their uniform. And don’t forget the personal—who does the POV character worry about? These details might seem small in the scheme of the fight, but they tell way more about the scope than sweeping explanations will. Choosing things that will affect your reader emotionally—whether you’re shocking them or making them tear up or something in-between—will go a long way to keeping them invested.

Don’t let the hero just dish it out. If your POV character never gets hurt, never slips up, never wants to just run away, the fact that your fight scene is pretty much rigged in their favor becomes unavoidable. Make it hard. Make your hero get hurt. Make a decision nearly cost them their life—make it cost someone else’s life. Make it create a bigger problem. Hell, just make your baddies get the heroes sweating if nothing else. No one likes a one-sided fight, even when they’re on the winning side.

Make the damage stick. It is inconvenient to have your character suffering from a broken rib while trying to save the world, but if you broke that rib, it better stay broken. Corollary: Go easy on the healing magic/tech. A little in a world that definitely has it makes sense; too much means none of your fights matter.

Act it out. Right—I know. I said the action was the easy part. But if you do all these other things and get the action wrong, your fight scene will still be bad. Get someone to stand in for your opponent and (gently) walk through the moves (The Husband made a particularly devious Andareunarthex). Spells, you can’t do much with but be creative and consistent. But do your research for everything else—how far does an arrow fly; how deep does a bolt puncture; what if there’s armor; if you’re pinned, how can you wrestle your way up; if someone grabs you, how would you throw them off; how heavy is a short sword; how heavy are the bullets for that gun? The information is out there. There are no excuses for writing scenes where scimitar-wielding youths do handsprings across the battlefield.

There are always exceptions, of course, and there are always those who like their combat porn. But in general, these six tips have helped me learn to like writing fight scenes, and keep them a little more interesting.

What about you? What fight scenes from fiction did you love to read? What helps you write a better fight scene?

4 Responses to Combat Porn

Thats a helpful post, I can see fight scenes in my story where nothing changes afterwards, which is, as you say, flab. I can see too much combat description for others who are not the main character. More flab! Time to get the editing liposuction happening. Thanks!